From South Africa comes a powerful statement on
peace and reconciliation and repentance, in a letter from Bishop Peter
Storey, professor of the practice of Christian ministry. His fight
against apartheid in South Africa has made him a powerful symbol of
justice in South Africa.
He wrote this letter two days after the Sept. 11
acts of terrorism.
[10-9-01]
Dear Friends in the United States,
We mourn with you. Because we know and love so many of
you, and have lived long enough among you to feel at least a measure of
your hurt.
We continue to spend most of our days watching the
layers of pain unfold across your land. From time to time, my mind
closes down from overload, unable to hold the measure of horror, then
some image brings it back to sharp focus again. The small things do
this, the things one's mind and heart can grasp. A woman, showing
pictures of her husband to anyone she can. A brawny, bone-weary fireman
sluicing the dust off his head. Crowds shouting their thanks to convoys
of grim construction workers, driving their rigs into the disaster area.
Another crowd in another land, weeping as, for the first time in
history, a "foreign" anthem is played in the forecourt of
Buckingham Palace.
We have been moved, as always, by the response of so
many, acting so rapidly, and with purpose, to bring succor, ministering
to the nation's wounds. There is something deeply stirring about the
capacity of the American people to mobilize communities for good.
There have been some unlikely heroes too. That rough
diamond, Rudy Giuliani, has stood out for me as the one who has
ministered truth and compassion to the people of New York. No shallow
bravado, no cheap pieties, but unsentimental, tough love that has come
across as extraordinarily human and pastoral - parenting New Yorkers in
their time of trial.
By contrast, it has been troubling to see how shallow
and shaky have been the first moves of the President, and how unsafe he
becomes when caught without a script. We must pray that this man will be
helped through this without taking the world deeper into disaster.
Sadly, at the invitation-only service at the National
Cathedral, the Church did not help him, nor further the Gospel. It was
sad to see the Church (and other religious traditions) laid so supinely
at the disposal of Caesar and his chaplains. It is one thing for the
Church to invite the leaders of the land to come like any others, to
pray, to seek God's healing and the guidance of God's word. It is
theologically an entirely different matter to provide a pulpit to the
head of state, enabling him to use a house of worship to rally the
nation for war, exactly contradicting some of the Scriptures that were
read. When uniforms and flags crowd God's house, it is hard for God's
word to be heard. A British TV reporter said afterward: "This
morning, in quick succession, President Bush got approval for his war,
first from Congress, then from the religious leaders." Did it occur
to anyone just how much this action resembled the use made of mosque
pulpits by the political leaders of some extreme Muslim fundamentalist
states?
After that carefully choreographed exercise, faithful
preachers will not have an easy task. As my preacher son said, "It
will be very difficult to balance the personal and pastoral on one hand,
and the political, or prophetic on the other."
Yet, as always, both dimensions exist in this
atrocity. To weep with Jesus over the city's wounds is our pastoral
imperative. To do so without asking his deep questions about why we
"do not know the things that make for peace," is a dereliction
of our calling.
In the midst of the weeping for the pain, which has
given way so rapidly to cries for vengeance, should we not listen for
another note - that of repentance?
Some of the questions that leap out at me right
now, are these:
How is it that we continue to be defrauded by the
false security of military might? The capacity to build an
anti-ballistic-missile system, and to "project power" across
the globe, seems almost ludicrous right now. The greatest military power
on earth has been struck at its heart by three of its own commercial
airliners, held to ransom by a handful of knife-wielding fanatics. Yet,
nothing in the rhythm of human stupidity is likely to change. The
saber-rattling will grow louder, the outworn weapons of war will be
dusted off, and soon, somewhere in the "third world," - the
world I live in -many more people will die, adding to God's tears. More
hatred will be stored up in the ruins of some dusty country. We must
bear witness to another way - the Jesus way of nonviolence. This is
never more difficult than when we feel our loved ones and ourselves to
be under attack, yet that is surely the time when such a witness is
supremely relevant.
When will we have the courage to identify all
fundamentalism as the well from which hatred drinks? The
perpetrators of this horror will most likely be found to come from
Muslim fundamentalist ranks, but even as some outraged people take
revenge on innocent Muslim-Americans, we remember that it was Christian
fundamentalists who perpetrated the second worst terrorist attack on
American soil. McVeigh was the extreme product of the theological poison
that masquerades as Christianity in hundreds of churches, and which we
tend to shrug off as "misguided, but sincere." Witness the
hatred toward a whole slew of scapegoats that came from Jerry Falwell
and Pat Robertson while the flames in Manhattan and Washington DC still
burned. Fundamentalism - Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, whatever - is
surely the enemy of each of these faiths and will continue to turn them
into instruments of division and death instead of unity and life.
While it is right to ask in horror, "What kind of
people can perform such hateful, deranged deeds?" there is another
question: "What have we done that anybody can hate us so
much?" This is a hard question to ask at a time of such pain,
but we pray that out of all this horror, there may be a better capacity
to hear it (although I fear the opposite). Part of the response to that
question may be simply that the big boy on the block is always disliked
by all the little guys who wish they were as big. But it's not as simple
as that. There is a myth, cherished by the vast majority of Americans,
that their nation's foreign and economic policy is both moral and
benign. From other vantage points it is viewed very differently. I think
of our anger in South Africa at the American unwillingness to engage the
issues of slavery and Israeli oppression in Durban recently and their
attempt to torpedo the whole conference because they could not dominate
it. How much more resented in the Arab world, which has endured nearly a
century of humiliation at the hands of the West? The unquestioning
support for Israel, led now by a man whose past includes military
atrocities against Palestinians, and who orders extra-judicial
executions of their leadership every day, is beyond our comprehension.
It goes far beyond ensuring Israel's legitimate right to survive.
US-driven economic "globalisation" has enriched the
shareholders of Wall Street beyond their dreams, but its destructive
impact on the poor of "emerging economies" goes unacknowledged
and unquestioned in Congress, and the increasingly angry demonstrations
against it are swept aside with teargas and disdain.
The cone of silence around these questions needs to
be broken. With mainstream politicians fearful of even appearing to
address them surely the Church must do so? It will be difficult, but to
the degree that this nightmare of terror is related to those questions,
is this now the time to ask them?
I have often suggested to American Christians that the
only way to understand their mission is to ask what it might have meant
to witness faithfully to Jesus in the heart of the Roman Empire.
Certainly, when I preach in the United States, I feel as I imagine the
Apostle Paul did, when he first passed through the gates of Rome -
admiration for its people, awe at its manifest virtues, and resentment
of its careless power. American preachers have a task more difficult,
perhaps, than those faced by us under South Africa's apartheid, or
Christians under Communism. We had obvious evils to engage; you have to
unwrap your culture from years of red, white and blue myth. You have to
expose, and confront, the great disconnect between the kindness,
compassion and caring of most American people, and the ruthless way
American power is experienced, directly and indirectly, by the poor of
the earth. You have to help good people see how they have let their
institutions do their sinning for them. This is not easy among people
who really believe that their country does nothing but good, but it is
necessary, not only for their future, but for us all.
All around the world there are those who believe in
the basic goodness of the American people, who agonize with you in your
pain, but also long to see your human goodness translated into a
different, more compassionate way of relating with the rest of this
bleeding planet.
With love and solidarity,
Peter Storey
